Rants, Technology

SEO, Marketing, and Spam

9 Comments

Anyone who knows me will know my dislike of marketing: the art of disguising what you are selling, hiding the true meaning of words, and bullshitting. Selling stuff no-one wants, at least some of the time. I’m too direct for this sort of fluff.

Marketing brings you crap like this, for example.

This time, what’s set me off is SEO, or specifically, a bottom-feeder idiot spammer.

Now, SEO and indeed Internet marketing done well can be a great thing for a commercial site, as explored by Stu on his blog here. Stu has a commercial website and approached people to help.

I, however, operate a crappy personal site with no commercial interest and a very clear policy concerning spam, so I was a bit annoyed to get this spam:


Good Morning,

My name is Amanda Kelly, and I hope you do not mind me contacting you.

As it happens, I do.

I recently visited your website, piglet-net.net , as I was hoping to help you secure more traffic to your website via the Google, Bing and Yahoo natural listings.

If you *had* visited the site, you might have noticed that:

1. It’s a personal site and I don’t give a shit what traffic it attracts.
It’s a place for me to put all the crap I shower upon an undeserving
world, not a commercial venture.

2. I have a policy concerning unsolicited email plainly linked from the
home page:

http://www.piglet-net.net/uce-policy.html

As I have had no prior contact with your company, your email is
unsolicited commercial email.

I work for an established optimisation and Internet Solutions Agency in the North West of England. We have been involved in optimising websites for over 10 years and are confident we can help you in achieving your goals for the forthcoming year. In fact we are so confident with our methods that we offer a service guarantee not offered by most other Companies.

Going back to your website, rather than simply sending you a general e-mail about our services, it would be more important to you, for me to point out a few simple facts about your website that are impacting on your current search engine rankings.

Firstly, I checked the number of back links Bing are reporting as this gives us an accurate reading compared to Google. Bing are currently reporting 68, which you can check for yourself by typing in, inbody:www.piglet-net.net into Bing. Backlinks play a significant role within ranking of your website. Without relevant and quality backlinks, even the best of websites will not be found! Just compare some of your high ranking competitor sites to your own to see the difference!

Secondly, I checked the number of pages being indexed by Bing. The reported number of pages Indexed is 40. The more pages indexed, the more information the search engines can return to their users about your website. If the content is unique and plentiful then you have a good chance of getting higher up the ladder! Your current page count suggests it can be improved upon significantly.

My final check was the Google Pagerank score. Currently your home page has a Pagerank of 0. which, when compared to other high ranking competitor websites, is definitely restricting your rankings.

There can be many reasons for these low scores which we can help to identify and then resolve.

So, here's a recap of my findings on piglet-net.net

- Your Google Pagerank is 0 - You have 68 back-links - Your website has 40 pages indexed

My apologies if I am stating the obvious here, but the higher your website is ranking for your most important keyphrases that outline what your business offers, the more traffic will visit your website, therefore securing more revenue.

This is where we can help. We operate successful optimisation campaigns for many different types of businesses and have secured many top rankings such as: Maternity Clothes, Dubai Properties, Gravel, Health Store, Van Hire, Fire Extinguishers, Coffee Machines, Swimwear, Limo Hire and more.

If you would like to hear more on exactly what we can do for you to take your website to the next level or about our service guarantee, then please feel free to contact me on 0844 740 4951 and press Option 1 or simply reply to this mail with a convenient time to call you so that I can produce a full and detailed proposal outlining exactly how we can help you dominate your chosen field of business. Alternatively please feel free to visit our service website at http://www.theseoco.co.uk/

Kind regards,

Amanda Kelly

Senior Search Consultant

The SEO Co

0844 7404951

Providing SEO for clients since 1999

Note: This email is not spam, it was manually sent by us,

In that case, presumably you accept the conditions in the link above? As
stated, I would tend to disagree that the mail is not spam, whether
manually sent or not. I will be reporting you to your ISP’s abuse
contacts. Might I ask that you fuck off and never bother me again, perhaps
pausing to consider finding a decent way to promote your ‘business’ or
should I send an invoice?


our sole purpose being to introduce ourselves to you with no obligation on your part. Your email address was found to be publicly available and it has not been added to any list. We consider this to be a polite way to contact you and apologize sincerely if you have been inconvenienced in any way. We are obliged to offer you an 'OPT-OUT' from future mailings from us; should you wish to exercise this right, please reply with "OPT-OUT" in the subject field.

Usually, and indeed the best response usually, is to ignore spam, but I was feeling like being an arsehole, so I replied to the email as per my comments above. I’m not expecting a reply.

So. Back to the marketing: I hate cold calling. I hate spam even more. If I wish to buy a product, I will call you. If your product is good, and ironically, you do SEO properly, it might be you I call.

SEO spam is the bane of an actual webmaster’s life, and spammers are the bane of a mail system admin’s life. Thanks to idiots like this, we have to use spam filters, DNSBLs, and restricted SMTP relays: simple, proven systems are made complicated by idiots like this. If you ever get mail returned with a NDR for no good reason, or vanish into a black hole thank people like this.

Why do the fuckwits do it?

Meanwhile, if any spam harvester bots are passing by, then please send some mail to info@theseoco.co.uk, unless anyone fancies doing a bit of a counter-strike a la Alan Ralsky?

9 thoughts on “SEO, Marketing, and Spam”

  1. I can usually tell the difference between manually generated stuff and auto. I’ve had some sport, including one US “teambuilder” who spammed me on a brand new e mail address which was specifically for my new phone. He insisted I had opted in to his program.

    I called him a spamming twat and he reluctantly removed me manually from the spam list (after telling me I should use the unscubscribe mechanism so he could sell on a live e mail address). He added that he would not have such a vulgar and nasty person as me on his “winning team”.

    What a cunt he was ! Me, nasty and vulgar ?

  3. I’m OK for the patches, but had to Google Accai berries. It’s all SEO, Life Insurance, and Lovefilm over here, though I don’t see most of it.

    I’ve decided that on the odd occaision I have any contact with them, I’m going to be as rude as possible to the spamming twats. They deserve it 🙂

  4. I’ve had a similar e-mail from your “SEO advisor” to which I replied in much the same manner. They must have found my site from yours. We’ve also had a similar one on the BCOSS Blog which I responded more politely for the sake of keeping it legal. But I digress – have you come off the ceiling yet?

    I’m interested in what your “Competitor” sites are and what is your chosen business field you intend to dominate? Has the bimbo not read your blog? These people always amaze me!

  7. In today’s consumer society it is much easier to sell things based on the fact that people want and need things they don’t really want, but advertising persuades them to think differently. Having studied a degree in PR I know too well that advertisers don’t have much concern for exploitation and profitability and success are key motivators. Advertising helps firms to sell products, but at the same time creates false needs.

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